Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Kindle fear arrives at last: don't carry one to Thebes

It's a sign that the Kindle has achieved some sort of cultural status, when the New York Times can run editorials about how scary it is.  Roy Blount Jr., whom I admire as a comedian, offers a very strange sort of take on why the Kindle is bad.

One idea is the copyright infringement argument.  This refers to the text reading function which appears in the new Kindle: "Kindle 2 can read books aloud. And Kindle 2 is not paying anyone for audio rights."  The Authors Guild, of which Blount is president, has already taken issue.

Others have already offered counterarguments, namely that the feature isn't likely to appeal widely enough to create noticeable royalties.  Or, if it does boost sales, it boosts sales.  But it is noteworthy for fearsome digital technology studies to see this new front open up.

Listen, too, to the odd, sad opening line:

Being president of too many well-meaning organizations put my father into an early grave. The lesson in this was not lost on me. But now I am president of the Authors Guild, whose mission is to sustain book-writing as a viable occupation...

What a grim way to begin the piece.  And what an Oedipal, parricidal theme to evoke.  Blount even returns to it at the end, in a way that's charming, sweet, and somewhat scary:

no, the Authors Guild does not expect royalties from anybody doing non-commercial performances of “Goodnight Moon.” If parents want to send their children off to bed with the voice of Kindle 2, however, it’s another matter.

The death of a father, plus children's stories - these go together very deeply.

This isn't to say Blount's piece isn't (intentionally) funny.  I love this idea:

the voices of Kindle 2 are quite listenable. There’s even a male version and a female version. (A book by, say, Norman Mailer on Kindle 2 might do a brisk business among people wondering how his prose would sound in measured feminine tones.)

YouTomb, or the empty shells live on

One form of the spooky, haunted internet is the existence of dead sites.  These appear because of abandonment, or sometimes because their primary content has been gutted.  Case in point for the latter: YouTomb, a skeletal archive of YouTube pages where the videos have been deleted.

Note that the primary motivation for removing content is alleged copyright infringement.  YouTomb is one after-action battlefield for the copyright wars.

The scope of the project is huge, suggesting a vast wasteland of empty page shells:

YouTomb, which launched about two months ago, is currently monitoring close to a quarter-million videos, and Jansen says the team is eager to expand its scope. Currently, the site only monitors popular YouTube videos...

It's worth comparing these pages to Gothic architecture, which was originally based on buildings emanating from power, but rendered uncanny by the passage of time.  YouTube lacks the military, aristocratic, or ecclesiastical context for 18th-century structures, but quite readily conforms to the corporate power of our time.

(via Smartmobs)

Fan remix and the IP underground: vidding well

A terrific epigram for the state of copyright today:

Luminosity is the best fan that shows like Friday Night Lights, Highlander, Farscape, and Buffy ever had—but she can’t use her real name in this interview for fear that their producers will sue her.

She goes on:

How do vidders find one another?
I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you—no, seriously, this is a highly contested issue within the vidding community. Even though we believe our work is legitimate and transformative art, a lot of vidders prefer to stay out of the spotlight until the legal situation is clearer.

Having to hide under pseudonyms, meet in secret, share in the shadows - copyright law has brought us to a pretty place. 

The whole interview is worth reading.

(via Reasonblog)

Molecular rights management: new intellectual property meme

Molecular rights management is a meme experiment launched by Jamais Cascio.  It's IP protection for nanotechnology.  One imagines nanobots that can't be copied, or moved from a certain location, or applied to a different medium.

MRM is likely to emerge for two primary reasons: the continued need for intellectual property controls, so as to prevent a wave "napster fabbing;" and the need for security to prevent the production of controlled goods ("assault rifles," figuratively or literally).

A glimpse from the future as it approaches.  Or looking forward in classic extrapolation, seeing two trends (DRM and nano) rise and intersect.

A history of modern mashups

"Remix Culture: The Early Years" samples a series of mashups and related art from the past few years.  A useful blitz history - and with a copyright argument at the end.

(via Brian Lamb via his del.icio.us)

Alienating copyright, or copyLeft for real

A truly left-wing copyright proposal comes from Dmitri Kleiner.  He proposes disallowing commercial use of intellectual property by commercial interests.  That was noncommercial entities - workers - can exploit their own labor.

When you hear critics complaining that Larry Lessig has a left-wing approach to IP, please refer them to this article for the truer item.

(thanks to Jesse Walker)

Copyright fiction, the latest iteration

"Gucci DRM" is a short-short story about digital rights management (DRM).  Which puts it in the very selective membership of intellectual property fiction.  I can't imagine a story about 2015 without augmented reality, but it is a short-short.

Speaking of IP fiction, two years ago I wrote up an initial copyright fiction corpus.  Has anything emerged since?

We can also consider copyright fiction to be a subset of literature of information.

(via name-checked BoingBoing)

To kick Helprin

I read Mark Helprin's awful, sad opinion piece in favor of eternal copyright this Sunday.  It gave me a pleasant dose of mocking-based laughter for the minute required to read the thing.  Some asides occurred to me along the way - is it funny that he steals from Mark Twain without mentioning him? and that he claims to have written the Great American Novel?  Ultimately it just wasn't that interesting.

Larry Lessig and others are wiki-fying a response.  But it does feel a bit like debating a creationist.  Perhaps Helprin's whine is simply better off forgotten, Stephen Downes notes.

The end of copyright: Bruce Lehman

Bruce Lehman, the man who led the development of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA, 1998) has now decided that that policy hasn't worked out well (link to another Bryan blog). But I wanted to quote this one other,  breathtaking observation, which speaks to the history of information:

"The cat's out of the bag... Our attempts at copyright control have not been successful... We are now in, if not entering, the post-copyright era... ."

Many of us have been making that argument for years, and it's still a controversial idea.  But it's amazing to her Bruce Lehman say that.

Lehman also thinks we're going back to patronage.  Meh, I'm not sure I see that as the dominant mode.  It is happening in some ways.

(via BoingBoing)

NPR on the side of internet radio

National Public Radio, America's big nonprofit radio entity, is now fighting a good fight against excessive fees for internet radio.